Slacker today launched Slacker Premium Radio, a new service that provides on-demand access to the Slacker music library. Slacker Premium is available today via the BlackBerry app and other platforms as well. With the launch of Slacker Premium Radio, Slacker becomes the first music service to deliver three complementary tiers. Slacker Premium enables listeners to search and play specific songs and albums from the Slacker library. Users can also access top songs and artists from each of the Slacker stations. Slacker is available free for BlackBerry Smartphones and a premium version is also available. Hit the link below for more and keep reading for the full press release.

Slacker Launches Slacker Premium Radio with On-Demand Access to Music Library

Slacker First to Provide Complete Range of Services for Listeners from Free Personal Radio to On-Demand Music

SAN DIEGO - May, 17 2011 - Slacker, Inc. today launched Slacker Premium Radio, a new tier of service that provides music lovers with on-demand access to the Slacker music library including individual songs, albums, top charts, station playlists, single-artist radio stations and more. Slacker Premium takes the power, functionality and music discovery that Slacker Radio provides and combines it with the flexibility of integrated on-demand access for a new tier of service that provides the best of all worlds. Slacker Premium is available today on the web, and on new applications for iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, Android and BlackBerry smartphones. These applications deliver new features for all listeners, including free listeners, subscribers to Slacker Radio Plus and now subscribers to Slacker Premium Radio.

With the launch of Slacker Premium Radio, Slacker becomes the first music service to deliver three complementary tiers. From the entirely free Slacker Basic Radio service, to the ad-free and feature-rich Slacker Radio Plus and now on-demand access with Slacker Premium Radio, Slacker meets the needs of all music fans. Whether listeners prefer a superior free personal radio experience or the power of a fully-loaded music subscription service, Slacker is the only offering to provide the full suite of options.

Slacker Premium Radio enables listeners to search, play and replay specific songs and entire albums from the Slacker library, which features over 8 million songs, as well as provides easy access to top songs and artists from each of the 150+ expert-programmed Slacker genre stations**. Listeners also have the ability to create specific playlists both on mobile and on the web, and even experience off-line playback through the ability to cache stations, playlists and entire albums.

A new Slacker station creator provides all listeners the ability to quickly and easily create multi-artist stations, with custom fine-tuning features for the perfect radio experience. All Slacker listeners also have the ability to create a radio experience ranging from stations based on a single artist to stations created by entering hundreds of hand-picked artists. In addition, Slacker Premium listeners can create and enjoy stations that will only play songs from a single chosen artist or band.

In addition to the ability to search the entire Slacker catalog, the new Slacker Premium Radio service gives listeners more ways to browse stations than ever before, allowing an even deeper music discovery experience. Listeners can now browse expert hand-programmed genre stations to search and play top artists, view and play top songs and albums, allowing behind the scenes access to the "Top 50" charts for every station. The Slacker Premium Radio interface also includes all-new artist pages, featuring the artist biography, all songs by the artist, discography and related artists in addition to displaying on which Slacker stations each artist is programmed, for the ultimate artist access.

"Up until this point there has been an array of ‘Internet radio' and ‘on-demand' services with much debate about which is better from a content, experience and technology perspective," said Jonathan Sasse, senior vice president of marketing at Slacker. "Slacker Premium Radio provides music lovers with the best of both. We believe the combination of a world class radio service providing music discovery up front with on-demand access to any song and entire albums is the winning combo."

Slacker Radio offers a fully customizable and personal online radio experience that includes the most varied and compelling range of content offered by any Internet radio service. The Slacker Radio experience includes over 150 expert-programmed music stations, ABC news, comedy, custom artist-hosted showcase stations and leading music festival stations along with personalized ESPN Sports content integration coming soon. With a music catalog that is over ten times larger than the leading radio competitor, Slacker Radio gives listeners the ultimate music discovery resource.

Slacker Premium Radio:

Search, play and replay specific songs or entire albums

Create specific playlists on mobile and on the web

Off-line playback of stations, playlists and albums on the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, Android and BlackBerry smartphones

Replay specific songs on programmed and custom stations

Browse and play "Favorite" songs, now collected in one location

Unlimited song skipping

Ad-free listening

Complete song lyrics

Browse Top Charts on all Slacker genre stations

"Peek Ahead" artist, album and song preview

Ability to skip forward and backward

Pricing and Availability

The new Slacker Premium Radio tier is available now on the web and on new applications for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch and supported Android and Blackberry smartphones. Slacker Premium Radio is available starting today for $9.99 per month at Slacker.com or billed directly to your Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile USA or AT&T account from within the Slacker application on Android and BlackBerry smartphones. Slacker Premium Radio includes all new features, as well as all of the features available to Slacker Basic and Slacker Radio Plus listeners.

For a limited time, a free subscription to Slacker Premium Radio is available by visiting www.Facebook.com/SlackerRadio.

Reader comments

Slacker Launches Slacker Premium with On-Demand services

Surprised this was the last site to post this up... shame, shame! But I'll give a quick warning- if you have some cached stations, after doing the update you MUST re-cache them to make them available in the new version. If you do so, be aware that it might render your phone pretty much unusable while it does so. Best to wait and have it do it while charging over wifi overnight- or you can manually do it thru the sync app while it's wired to the PC.

Slacker has always been a nice app, one that I would be more than willing to pay a reasonable price. But this is where I get off the Slacker rolls. Call it a futile, ineffectual protest, but I will do what little I can toward fighting back from the Applization of all things digital, where free access and the free flow of information has steadily given way to a "there's a fee for that" mentality. Of course Slacker is entitled to the fruits of their labors and should be rewarded for their good work and creativity. But not with me paying off every month like a green grocer. I expect the artists who make the music that drives Slacker get their cut, and more power to them because Slacker trades and prospers on the worth of their intellectual property.

But I can find my way to artists and songs I like without a monthly fee, and I would rather pay the artists more directly, even if it that has to be through some other intermediary like Amazon's mp3 service. At least Amazon isn't trending so heavily away from broader and more free access.

The whole evolution of digital music, digital cinema and digital reading supports the conclusion that those who are more open with their wares are ultimately rewarded, yet technology is advancing every day to interpose devices, services and bandwidth as a series of toll-gates before you can be allowed to have those ideas, books, movies, songs, that you enjoy and want to explore.

With Slacker, its always been intelligently executed, and there is still much to recommend it. But it has evolved from a wonderful free application to a series of incremental payments, with the free versions purposefully made more annoying and useless at each step, to compel users to pay up and keep on paying. I don't really mean to single Slacker out, but it is a high-profile place to start.

The whole 300,000 app world is the fractionation of the ways things were just a short while ago, only now there are nickle-and-dimers spreading everywhere like some gray goo. Search engines are already pushing right up to and passed the line of their essential utility -- the location of and road-map to useful information. Now the owners of the engines are so intent on ringing their cash registers as often as possible, they have allowed everyone with an on-line pay account to crowd out even the real thing, which had been the gold in the gold-rush that made the search industry so lucrative. Expect within not too distant a time, new "premium" search services, owned either directly or indirectly by the same entities and people that own the search engines, where, if you will pony serious up-front money, you will be spared the suffocating, non-stop infomercials that bleed across ever results page.

At the end of the day, the very stuff of intellectual property, the ideas, will be another bauble for those most able to afford such luxuries. This is not what Gutenberg was supposed to have wrought.

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